Inferring sources of substandard and falsified products in pharmaceutical supply chains
针对中低收入国家常见的劣质和伪造药品问题，利用供应链信息与市场监测数据，提出贝叶斯方法推断问题产品的来源，帮助监管机构更精准地打击假药。
Substandard and falsified pharmaceuticals, prevalent in low- and middle-income countries, substantially increase levels of morbidity, mortality and drug resistance. Regulatory agencies combat this problem using post-market surveillance by collecting and testing samples where consumers purchase products. Existing analysis tools for post-market surveillance data focus attention on the locations of positive samples. This article looks to expand such analysis through underutilized supply-chain information to provide inference on sources of substandard and falsified products. We first establish the presence of unidentifiability issues when integrating this supply-chain information with surveillance data. We then develop a Bayesian methodology for evaluating substandard and falsified sources that extracts utility from supply-chain information and mitigates unidentifiability while accounting for multiple sources of uncertainty. Using de-identified surveillance data, we show the proposed methodology to be effective in providing valuable inference.